Completeness

Suppose I were to take a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle, dump all the pieces out of the box in a pile and divide the pile in half, keeping half the pile and giving you the other half. Now suppose we each take our piles and go to opposite sides of the room to work on our half of the puzzle. Let’s say we each take one piece randomly from the pile, and looking only at that piece, try to guess what the puzzle is a picture of. We probably will have very different guesses. Now let’s say we work on the puzzle for a while and are able to assemble a few large parts and a few small parts, and then we guess again. Chances are, we will both be able to make a better guess, and though our guesses may not yet be the same, they are probably more closely related than our first guesses. Now let’s say we have spent quite a while on our puzzle and each of us has assembled all that we possibly can with our half of the puzzle. Although we each have only half a puzzle, and our picture is still full of holes, chances are we now can recognize what the picture is and if we describe it to each other, the differences in our descriptions will be relatively minor. As differing models become more complete, they begin to resemble one another.

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